[WCUSP] Welcome to 'Palestine' by Robert Fisk

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

Robert Fisk: Welcome to 'Palestine'
Published: 16 June  2007

http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2663199.ece

How  troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that 
the  Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - 
Hamas -  and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza 
Strip. And  we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited 
President,  Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation 
marks in  place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we  negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should 
have talked to  Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically 
elected government  of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have 
voted for Fatah and  its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which 
declines to  recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo  
agreement.

No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas  was supposed to 
recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967  borders? The 
Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements  for Jews and 
Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per  cent of 
"Palestine" still left to negotiate over ?

And so today, we  are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, 
the "moderate" (as  the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian 
leader, a man who wrote  a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning 
the word "occupation",  who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather 
than "withdrawal", a  "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes 
to the White House and  says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't 
vote for Hamas because  they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how 
Hamas's bloody victory will  be represented - but because they were tired of 
the corruption of Mr Abbas's  Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian 
Authority".

I recall  years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls 
had just  been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck 
me were  the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of 
them -  were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to 
corruption  - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and 
thus we,  the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve 
them and  bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer 
"Palestine"  EU membership if only it would be gracious enough to vote for 
the 
right  people?

All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai  in 
Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his  government 
(and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent  Afghan 
civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of  Helmand 
province).

We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers  have not yet finished with 
the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently  arrested outside Cairo, whose 
presidency received the warm support of Mrs -  yes Mrs - George W Bush - and 
whose succession will almost certainly pass to  his son, Gamal.

We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya  whose werewolves have 
murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder  King Abdullah of Saudi 
Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli  - Colonel Gaddafi, it 
should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack  Straw for abandoning 
his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose  "democracy" is perfectly 
acceptable to us because he is on our side in the  "war on terror".

Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional  monarchy in Jordan, and 
all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially  those who are paid such 
vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland  Yard has to close down 
its investigations on the orders of our prime  minister - and yes, I can 
indeed see why he doesn't like The Independent's  coverage of what he 
quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs -  and the Iranians - 
would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons  and daughters are 
educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the  "Middle East" would be 
to control.

For that is what it is about -  control - and that is why we hold out, and 
withdraw, favours from their  leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will 
our own elected leaders do?  Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, 
Washington and Moscow now have to  talk to these wretched, ungrateful people 
(fear not, for they will not be  able to shake hands) or will they have to 
acknowledge the West Bank version  of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of 
hands) while ignoring the elected,  militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?

It's easy, of course, to call down a  curse on both their houses. But that's 
what we say about the whole Middle  East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn't 
President of Syria (heaven knows what  the alternative would be) or if the 
cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad  wasn't in control of Iran (even if he 
doesn't actually know one end of a  nuclear missile from the other).

If only Lebanon was a home-grown  democracy like our own little back-lawn 
countries - Belgium, for example, or  Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle 
Easterners vote for the wrong people,  support the wrong people, love the 
wrong people, don't behave like us  civilised Westerners.

So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of  Gaza perhaps? Certainly we 
will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on  giving our affection to the 
kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the  Middle East until the whole 
place blows up in our faces and then we shall  say - as we are already saying 
of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our  sacrifice and our love.

How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected  government?




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